Art exhibition listings

Suo Zhen-hai, Falls Plummeting Three Thousand Feet (20th century).

Photo Courtesy of National Museum of History

The National Museum of History presents snuff bottle art by the late Chinese artisan Suo Zhen-hai (索振海). Inside-Painted Masterpieces (神壺奇技) is 150 snuff bottles with intricate inch-tall birds, horses, people and splendid mountain views painted on the glass interior with a tiny curved brush. Decorated snuff bottles were used to hold powdered tobacco leaves during the Qing Dynasty, during which smoking tobacco was illegal.

■ National Museum of History, 49 Nanhai Rd, Taipei City (台北市南海路49號), tel: (02) 2361-0270. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm. General admission: NT$30

■ Until Jan. 19

Tu Pei-shih (杜珮詩) presents three offbeat animations in Making Fantasies (想像的製造). In the titular Making Fantasies (想像的製造), Tu tells a winsome but ultimately deceptive narrative using images “of truth”: documentary photographs by famous photographers. In King Kong (金剛), she stitches together clips from all the King Kong movies since 1933, creating a “best-of” video that highlights Hollywood’s advances in animation technology. Last Wills (遺願) features the last words of seven historic figures including Franz Kafka (“Kill me, or else you are a murderer!”) and Beethoven (“I shall hear in heaven.”) In lighthearted animation sequences, she recreates the speaker and the original intentions, or the secret wish, behind each famous last utterance.

A Space Elsewhere (另一個空間) features oil paintings, installations and works on paper by Chiang Yomei (蔣友梅), former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) oldest grandchild. She brings I Can See What I Am, an installation based on her redevelopment project for the Famen Temple complex in Xian, China. In paintings, Chiang layers colors so that the canvas is fluid and bright yet opaque, like the surface of a lake, and appears to change under the gaze. “The works reflect an ephemeral nature, emphasizing the elusiveness of identity, and the possibilities beyond boundaries,” according the gallery notes. Chiang is an artist and art historian who works in London.

Imaginary Landscapes II – Immortal Quest (想像的風景II — 不朽的追求) is a showcase for the 50 winning computer graphics, video art, installations and interactive works in a competition hosted by Ecole Professionnelle des Arts Contemporains (EPAC), a comic and game art college in Switzerland. EPAC invited students from Europe and Asia to submit works that investigate the issue of human death in a digitized society.

In Indexing the Moon (指月錄), conceptual and performance artist Shi Jin-hua (石晉華) questions the concept of the art gallery. Shi believes the objects contained within the exhibit can’t be art, but at most behave as indices of art that lies elsewhere. Shi coaxes viewers to this realization with photographs of buildings, penned notes and other pedestrian objects that make no claims to meaning within the gallery.